The Non-negotiables

The questions of crisis recruitment in football

One of the most repetitive things about this sort of hobbyist writing I do is that, without fail, it seems to come from a place of negativity. I’ve recently written about Dinamo Zagreb and their crisis of results that, since that came out, has seen Nenad Bjelica sacked and replaced with Fabio Cannavaro in the dug-out meaning the HNL coaching staff is now 20% made up of Italy’s 2006 World Cup winning squad. I’ve recently written about (sigh) Carlisle United, whose New Year’s Day fixture at Crewe I attended and, regrettably, stayed till the final whistle.

I write about these things because they interest me but they also tend to have interesting things to point out. After all, what is a piece of writing if it doesn’t have a compelling narrative and tragedy and comedy are nothing if not compelling narratives and tend to both be present in these situations. I end up sniping from the sidelines because it’s a) easy and b) generally quite cathartic.

This isn’t that. Over the past few months, I’ve been doing more in football than before - completing stats work, doing more media stuff, scouting for a side in central Europe and moving along the Talent ID qualifications banner having decided that I want to make a proper go of it. This piece, then, is essentially a bit of a manifesto of my principles but it’s one informed by writing a lot about teams that aren’t doing things right because, ultimately, it’s only in seeing what’s not going well can you help identify what can be done correctly. A lot of what I’m going to put down is what clubs hopefully are doing already. If they aren’t doing it, supporters should be asking why.

Why is this important?

If you’re a sporting director, you’re setting a blueprint, in co-ordination with a head coach (at least) and members of the recruitment and analysis team, for what players come into your club. That blueprint should be working through a club from top to bottom so that players can slot in tactically to senior roles from academy roles smoothly but should not be so inflexible as to inhibit creativity.

There are a few ways to do this. The traditional one in terms of how one assesses a player is that you break skills into four distinct sections - physical, mental/psychological, tactical and technical - and you probably don’t need what those are explaining to you. The point is to build a picture of a player overall and you make decisions on recruitment based on the picture that’s painted.

Which poses a problem. What picture are you painting? Scouting shouldn’t be about creating a picture from scratch, it should be paint by numbers because you already know what you want. What you want isn’t a centre forward, what you want is someone who plays there who does a collection of different things. As such, you have to drill deeper.

That blueprint isn’t to say I want this sort of player, it’s “I want a player who does this”. Your recruitment blueprint isn’t a document based upon feel, it’s a document where you are stating the specific questions you want answered in recruiting a player (and, for that matter, a manager). On top of that, you are weighting those specific questions in a manner that allows those completing scouting assignments for you know what they should be focusing on.

As such, the traditional four corners methodology isn’t something I necessarily agree with. Physical and Psychological attributes are going to be reasonably similar asks across multiple roles, but Tactical and Technical ones are not and, therefore, those sections of your scouting report should be bespoke to how your side is playing. You want a left back and a striker to be calm under pressure, but you don’t necessarily want a striker to be a godd crosser from deep or a left back to be strong at holding the ball up. But the Physical and Psychological ones are often non-negotiables.

To look at Carlisle for a second, vs Accrington, they played with wide midfielder Jordan Jones as a stand-in captain. Jones has over 330 club appearances and, per transfermarkt, I can’t see any where he had been a captain before. If I google the words “Jordan Jones Controversy” I get him serving a ban for a breach during COVID, getting done for dangerous driving and getting sent off vs Celtic for a bad tackle. While I’m not wanting to dunk on Jones, if I was putting together a scouting report on him, suffice it to say that this sort of thing would be a red flag in the psychological section. No-one’s perfect, but in knowledge of that, would you be recruiting someone with that on their record? Even if you did take that chance, would you be making that person captain for an important game? Would you be asking if him not having been a captain the previous 330 times is actually because he’s not that material? When I hear Mike Williamson say in a press conference that one bad thing happening knocks the wind out of the side’s sails completely, that tells me that there is a psychological issue with the Carlisle side beyond anything else I’ve just mentioned about Jones but that sort of thing undoubtedly contributes. When I look at Carlisle United, I see a side that recruited without fully understanding their actual requirements and who replaced a manager without understanding how those requirements related to how that manager wanted to set up.

The role of the blueprint is to state the questions you want to answer. These are different between roles and between clubs so I’m going to follow this up by stating a few of my non-negotiables and how they’d apply into the sort of football I want to see.

What football do I want to see?

The more I’ve learned, the more I lean into a 3-4-3 as a primary formation of choice. My reasoning is that I like the options for underlapping/overlapping runs in wide areas it provides that can become a 5-4-1 in defensive phases and a 3-2-5 in attacking ones while also allowing one of the attacking three to have a truly free role with one pushing forward and dropping back as required. Similarly, in the central midfield, having one defensively minded player allows your other midfielder to take more advanced positions as required.

So, with that as a basis, what questions do we then ask of each role?

There are 8/9 distinct roles in this formation - goalkeeper, central CB, Wide CBx2, Wing-backs, 6, 8, CF, 10 (or a 10 and a 8.5). Taking simply one role, how in depth do our questions get?

The below would cover a fairly brief list of questions I’d be asking to see from the evidence.

Things like ability with the ball at feet would be looked at also but would probably come secondary to the below as the formation is asking for speed of distribution and the goalkeeper recycling the ball and going through a press rather than playing possession football around the back. One would probably break each ot these down further in actual recruitment and, to be fair, I’ve chosen goalkeeper specifically because the list of questions you’d ask is a bit less varied and of more reasonable length than it would be in other areas.

But if you’re, say, a new sporting director or head coach, one of your first questions around recruitment would be to ask what those questions are for your club. That tells you all you need to know about vision and the amount of required preparatory work for recruitment - if the answer is blank faces, then there’s a considerable amount of work to be done.

The non-negotiables

What would I deem as non-negotiables across all roles, in that case?

Physically, one would be looking at injury records. Opinions differ on certain injuries, but someone with a history of knee issues may see that as an indication of reduced agility. That might be a reasonable risk to take on recruiting a centre-back, but for someone as part of the attacking three where taking the ball on the turn and having to dribble or get between players in tight spaces, this might constitute an unacceptable level of risk of re-injury. Ultimately, player availability is as importance an attribute as many of the questions asked in other areas.

Psychologically, each player is an ambassador of their club. While “being a leader” is not an innate characteristic in itself, good decision making, a willingness to work hard and an ability to communicate are characteristics. For my own judgements, were I to see a player lose a ball and not then work to get it back, or to see a player jogging back, or to see a negative reaction to a refereeing decision, those are all negative flags. For scouting, as a discipline where you’re likely watching perhaps three games for a player where the player you’re looking at potentially does 50-60 actions on video per game, one or two instances of that naturally do carry more weight and warrant further investigation - particularly given that many scouts are able to view individual actions on the likes of Wyscout. On top of that, if scouting in person, you can see effort and attitude in pre-match warm-ups etc to give you a further idea of professionalism. If a question around a level of professionalism isn’t met, then they’re unlikely to get a positive recommendation.

That said, everything is about compromise and no player you assess is going to answer every single question you ask positively. But those set of psychological ones are ones that must be passed. If anything, with a club in a poor state of affairs, those psychological ones are more important than ever.

When we look back at Carlisle, the appointment of sporting director Rob Clarkson came well after the appointment of Head Coach Mike Williamson and the summer transfer window. When we look at Dinamo, who are on their third head coach of the season, that doesn’t suggest joined up thinking. At the time of some of the appointments in question, it’s fair to ask whether or not there was certainty over the questions of recruitment of particular players and roles which, therefore, left the side either signing the incorrect players or left them playing square pegs in round holes.

And this takes time. Tim Keech’s skeet below makes that pretty clear.

Once having the questions in place, it takes multiple windows to revitalise a squad and to get things right while also having an acceptable rate of “misses” but one thing is certain is that if you don’t have clarity in direction or clarity in that “route” of play, then you don’t get good at things quickly and you eventually get overtaken by those who do. What’s common across almost every side not doing well is that they have a lack of clarity and consistency in those areas and, as a result, can’t effect recruitment well.

Deciding on those non-negotiables is the first step of that.